SOURCE: Ellwood, Robert. “Joseph Campbell and the New Quest for the Holy Grail.” In The Politics of Myth: A Study of C. G. Jung, Mircea Eliade, and Joseph Campbell, pp. 127-201. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999.

In the following essay, Ellwood provides a biographical and critical study of Campbell and his work, and traces his literary and ideological development.

“the Savant as Reactionary”

Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) was probably the best known of all interpreters of myth to late twentieth-century Americans, thanks to a series of learned but highly readable books, assiduous lecture-hall performances, and above all his posthumous PBS appearances with Bill Moyers. The response to that series of six interviews was remarkable. As Mary R. Lefkowitz put it: “On television Joseph Campbell was the embodiment of the ideal academic: gentle, fatherly, informative, reassuring, unworldly, spiritual, and articulate without being incomprehensible. He was knowledgeable about what...